ARM and Android Expected to Power Low-Cost Tablet Push

If there’s one word to likely to be hot at next week’s Computex show in Taiwan, that word is tablets. And it’s beginning to look like some companies are laying plans to take two of the most popular technologies from the cellphone world and apply it to those larger portables.

Those technologies are chips based on designs from ARM Holdings and Google’s Android operating system. The results include greater performance and much lower pricing.

Via

VIA Vice President of Corporate Marketing Richard Brown

Or at least that’s the word from companies in the ARM camp, which includes Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Marvell and Nvidia, a newcomer in the ARM field that has combined its first microprocessor with circuitry for graphics and video in a chip called Tegra. Nvidia has been showing off prototypes of what Tegra will do in the field, suggesting performance to match Apple’s ARM-based iPad.

“The new Tegra-based tablets can handle all the rich media on the Web, and they do it in a way that takes full advantage of a tablet’s portability and interface,” gushed an Nvidia blog post in March.

One dark horse in the ARM camp is VIA Technologies. The Taiwanese company is usually known as the distant third-place runner in a race with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in the market for an altogether different kind of microprocessor, the x86 variety used in PCs. But Via also has a unit called WonderMedia Technologies that has licensed ARM designs, and has already placed them in some simple, inexpensive tablet machines from Chinese manufacturers shown off last week in a visit to San Francisco by Richard Brown, Via’s vice president of international marketing.

“You will see accessible price points as low as $100,” Brown says, far undercutting the iPad’s starting price of $499.

Android is the software of choice, Brown says, because it’s free and because there are already thousands of apps written for Android phones that will work in some fashion on Android-based tablets. “Currently Android is not optimized for tablets,” he says. “But you can do enough with it to make a reasonable package.”

Via isn’t the only new ARM contender in Asia that could make waves in low-end tablets, Brown says. Another is Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics, a startup based in mainland China, he says.

But don’t assume that Intel is conceding the new field. The big chip company has had trouble getting into cellphones, because of power consumption issues, but it has suggested the strong video performance of a recent version of its Atom chips will be a compelling selling point in tablets. Versions of Android that run on Intel’s chips are emerging, which has helped the company’s efforts, Intel executives say.

Mooly Eden, Intel’s vice president of client devices, said Monday that the company will use next week’s trade show to discuss new chips beyond Moorestown that are tailored for tablets. “For that we have special solution we are going to explore at the coming Computex,” he said.